JACKSON – The University of Mississippi Medical Center responded Tueday to allegations made at the state College Board meeting on Monday.
The Institutions for Higher Learning Board of Trustees cited the medical center in many of the criticisms that led to the non-renewal of the contract of Chancellor Dan Jones last Friday.
James Keeton, former vice chancellor and dean of health affairs at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, said the allusions made in Monday’s meeting did not accurately represent the current state of the medical center.
“Could we do better? Yes,” Keeton said. “Did we do wrong? Was there any loss of money? Was there any fraud or stealing? No. There was none of that.”
Jones offered a response to the mismanagement allegations to NewsWatch 99 in a telephone interview Tuesday.
“I was aware that we were working on making this better, and I got reports from time to time, but did I review individual contracts? Absolutely, not,” Jones said. “It wouldn’t be appropriate leadership for me to spend my time doing that.”
Many of these allegations centered around contract management at the medical center which Keeton said has been drastically improved in the past three years.
Keeton said UMMC noticed the contracts before the implementation of a new system in 2012, “ran over, sometimes the contracts were not renewed in time, sometimes they were overspent.”
In 2012, the medical center put in a contracts management office which further organized the process.
One of the accusations made by the IHL board concerned a delay in implementing a contract management system called Lawson Contract Management Module which was purchased in 2008.
Louann Woodward, current vice chancellor and dean of health affairs, said this was not due to any delay on the medical center’s part.
“I was involved in that implementation,” Woodward said. “At that point in time, the Lawson Company let us know that the Lawson Contract Management Module was very new and, in their words, ‘buggy.’”
Woodward said this delay in operation was held until the Lawson Module underwent significant updates and was ready for complete usage.
“The implementation of this has taken some time, but there has been a lot of back and forth in trying to figure out from the standpoint of an academic medical center, what is the best system to use?” Woodward said. “Yes, it has been slow, but it has not been slow for our lack of activity or lack of effort.”
Director of contracts management Stacy Baldwin said the program had to be reevaluated in 2012 when the contracts management office was formed.
“When I came to contracts administration we decided that rather than just implement what we had, we needed to make sure what we purchased years ago is what we needed now and in the future,” Baldwin said.
This system became fully operational last week when the first purchase orders were produced, Baldwin said. In Monday’s meeting however, vice president of the board Alan Perry said the contract system was still not functional.
“No, that’s not so,” Keeton said. “We have implemented the aspects of the contract management that he was referring to.”
Perry also cited the purchase of an unused gamma knife, a surgical instrument used to remove brain tumors, as poor allocation of funds. Jones countered his statement by explaining that although the medical center wasn’t prepared to install the equipment at the time of its purchase, they were saving money by buying it in bulk.
“The university did not lose any money and all the decisions that were made about the piece of equipment were honest and made in consultation with lots of informed people,” Jones said. “Like everything else, in retrospect you can question the business decision, but no money was lost for the university.”
Keeton said the allusions made to financial instability in the medical center were also unfounded.
“It was implied in some of the statements that we were in trouble financially – we are not in trouble financially. You can look at our financials. We are not losing money,” Keeton said. “In the past ten years there has only been one year that we have lost money at the University Medical Center. We are up now better than we’ve been in quite some time.”
Keeton said the medical center and the chancellor’s office have worked closely together and that he believes the issues that were alluded to have been addressed.
“I can’t speak to what Mr. Perry thinks about that,” Keeton said. “But the medical center has done everything it’s supposed to and there hasn’t been anything egregious here or anything where the state of Mississippi has lost money because of the university medical center.”
In regards to Dan Jones, Keeton said he has been extremely supportive of the medical center.
“It’s been a pleasure for us because he was over this,” Keeton said. “We talked to him two and three times a week. He’s never been in the dark about the things that are going on here.”
Keeton said he and his staff at the medical center did not suspect that any problems with the center would result in the non-renewal of Jones’ contract until Friday.
“I’m not happy,” Keeton said. “He’s a hell of a physician with great integrity. He cares about (the University Medical Center) and he cares about Ole Miss.”
